Amazing Spider-Man #700

[flint_marko]

Later, "Spidey" has all of his loved ones and friends go to his secret safe room to protect them from the escaped "Doctor Octopus."

Comments

[theflames]

It's happened quite a bit, be it an imposter or mind takeover, or body switch... it's a pretty used trope. Y'know, the switcheroo, freaky friday type storyline.

[sadoeuphemist]

Like when? The only thing coming to mind is the Justice League cartoon, and that had Flash having sex with Lex Luthor's girlfriend(?).

I actually went to tvtropes to find some more examples and most of the mistaken romantic identity thing involve shapeshifters or disguises and are pretty explicitly rapey.

[theflames]

Are you asking if mind switching is a trope, or if mind switching with the possibility of rape is a trope?

Because the former is a trope, the latter is just whatever direction the writer wants to take that trope in.

[sadoeuphemist]

I'm asking about what kusonaga said specifically:

"Is this a pretty typical comic book trope, where bad guy in good guy body kisses with good guy's girlfriend? Yes."

I can't really think of any examples like that, I guess because it's such a creepy scenario that most people avoid it.

[nezchan]

Honestly, pretty much all the examples I can think of are back in the Silver Age, and generally didn't go much beyond kissing the good guy's girlfriend (and often being revealed thereby). Other than that, all I can recall is the Chameleon thing.

[kusonaga]

Yeah, that's what I was going for. It's a very Silver Age comic booky thing to me, the mindswitch and (for now) rather chaste deception. Can it veer into awful territory, sure, but let's wait and see.

[sadoeuphemist]

I don't think that's a reasonable comparison. First, this isn't a chaste deception. MJ rips Peter's shirt open, and then Peter Octavius gets upset that she doesn't continue. It's pretty obvious where it's going right there.

Second, those kinds of Silver Age stories mostly lasted for the span of a single issue, and were goofy one-shots that didn't take their premises that seriously. That's why you could get away with things like Superman forcing Jimmy Olsen to marry a gorilla; no one would do an arc about that in modern-day comics. And this Superior Spiderpus thing is going to be an extended arc with its own new title and everything.

Third, Silver Age stories could be really sexist and creepy in their own right, so that's no defense.

There have been examples of the flip side of it..

[steverodgers5]

What I mean is, does anyone remember the episode of Buffy where Faith in Buffy's body slept with Buffy's then boyfriend Riley?

Afterwards Buffy felt betrayed that her boyfriend hadn't been able to see through the deception. And to be fair he did notice her acting a bit different, but seemingly just assumed she was just being in the mood to be more forward for a change.

I think that is quite realistic. Because if your boyfriend/girlfriend is acting differently, you're probably more inclined to write it off as a bizarre mood swing, rather than them being someone else, and probably likely to go along with it just hoping that they'll be more back to their usual self in the morning or whatever.

I do think though, that the longer Ock is in Pete's body, the less likely this should be to occur, given as some have pointed out above his old speech patterns are likely to show up quite often, and after a while MJ would click on to knowing that something was very wrong. But in the above example or the next issue or two, I'm sorry to say that if Ock decides to go through with it, it's likely that MJ would. Because if she's just wanting to believe that she and Pete could get back together, then she'll see what she wants to see, and so she would probably be more inclined to overlook it in the short term, but much less so the longer this goes on..

Urgh! I hate this whole topic. As the whole storyline disgusts me. (Which is annoying because up until this I was really enjoying Slott's Spidey..) But no. I can see how the worst could happen here. But that doesn't mean I want a writer creating the circumstances where it can..

[ablackraptor]

Not girlfriend, but something similar happened a very long time ago, back when Captain Britain till had his own comic, they had a storyline where he was attacked and replaced by an evil alternate universe version of himself. Said alternate universe version of himself then tried this with his sister, Betsy/Psylocke,back when she had her original body, both her eyes, and didn't do much fighting. Being that she was his sister, not his girlfriend, she refused and ended up killing him when he tried to force himself on her.

To make things all the more confusing and weird, IIRC, during the time this was happening, Brian was in the evil guy's universe, being tortured and used by a villainess as her sex slave. Yeah, it was a very rape filled story. Though, its kinda disturbing to know that its not the only time Brian as raped, and strangely, every time it happened he took it surprisingly well.